History
World Climate School (WCS) was founded in Molde, Norway in 2020, by Inger-Mette Stenseth. Stenseth has dedicated her life to transforming the global fashion and sports industry to be sustainable, while respecting human rights and biodiversity. With the Paris Agreement launch at COP21, in 2015, Stenseth was in Paris with a full focus on a sustainable global fashion industry partnering with the French Fashion Initiative,“Let us change fashion for the sake of the climate.”
During COP21, Hans Jorgen Rasmussen, WCS co-founder, a retired psychologist turned full time climate activist, was passionate about ensuring a livable future for his grandchildren, met Rob de Laet, an eco-tourism operator on a mission to save the Amazon Forest. Together Inger, Rob, and Hans, expanded WCS to Turkey, Zimbabwe, and Pakistan.
Registered in Norway in September, 1st, 2020, World Climate School was active online during the Covid lockdown, with webinars and piloting partnerships with the Training-of-Teachers Program in Turkey, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kenya, Peru, Japan, and many more countries. Open, free training programs for teachers and climate activists expanded at record speeds.
Further global expansion occurred when Inger-Mette Stenseth began working with Imagine Action, a group of social artists, bridging on-line facilitation for COP26 in Glasgow. She then advanced World Climate School in Stockholm for the 50th celebration of The United Nations Environmental Program in partnership with GlobeTree.
World Climate School incubated in a dynamic partnership with Norwegian Climate Network and the Climate Festival §112. From 2021-2023, the Norwegian Climate Network and World Climate School took part in Pan-European youth programs contracted through Erasmus+. WCS organized in-person Creative Climate Camps in Denmark, Italy, and The Youth Climate Summit in Norway, while additionally creating on-line youth climate programs.
In September 2023, World Climate School’s Inger-Mette Stenseth traveled to India in partnership with Dignity Education Vision International (DEVI SANSTHAN), and Sunita Gandhi, who connected Foundational Literacy and Numeracy to climate education, supported by Adventure of Humanity and Richard Nilsson.
In 2023, World Climate School supported emerging initiatives Green17 Partners and Plastiks.io. On The International Day of Biodiversity, April 22, 2023, Stenseth met PR strategist Karen A. Brown during The Cannes Film Festival, collaborating on global outreach for Ocean Impact at The Ritz Carlton, which brought climate awareness to the festival.
After a year of friendship, Inger and Karen decided to team up to create World Climate School US, in January of 2024.
The World Climate School US website launched on March 15th, 2024 with the support of strategic advisors in the fields of art, music, tech, and design.
Creative Climate Camp
Below is just one international collaborative project that Inger-Mette Stenseth has been involved with, in her many years of climate action. There are hundreds of other projects, each unique, and informative.
Inspiration by Ingrid Lovise @ingridloviseofficial
September, 5th-9th 2022, five days of International Campus took place at CasermArcheologica in Sansepolcro (AR) on the occasion of the European project C6 World Erasmus+, culture and collaboration to combat climate change. Twenty-five girls and boys from Denmark, Great Britain, Norway and Sweden participated to question themselves on a possible meeting point between creativity and sustainability.
The performance Frisk Flugt, organized by the Danish artist Tina Helen, highlighted how there is a strong discrepancy between the grid represented on a map and the labyrinthine development of anthropomorphic and natural operations that modify a landscape. The lines that appear to be so clear on the map, pure iconic signs, actually represent opaque areas, and these can be recognized as such only by walking and colliding with this discrepancy between the ideal route and the obligatory route.
The workshop proposed by the artist Roberto Ghezzi, focused on the cyanotype technique, instead allowed the boys and girls from Northern Europe to recognize and observe the particular ecosystem that inhabits the banks of the Tiber, a discovery that goes hand in hand with the recognition of the wounds inflicted by man on the territory in an indirect and direct manner.
Alongside the creative workshops to actively question ourselves on the ways in which urban spaces are perceived and interpreted and on the ability to make divergent choices, during the project days meetings were also offered aimed at exploring issues specifically linked to climate change and possible strategies to combat it. .
On 8 September 2022, Landshape was inaugurated within CasermArcheologica, set up in the noble rooms, it aims to be a trace of what was addressed during the week of meetings, as well as a concrete answer to the question "How to tackle climate change with a creative and constructive approach?”.